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January 2, 2013

Fast forwarding Red history

At the beginning of this new year, I took a moment to look at the work we did since the first public commit of Red. Even if I am a perfectionist that is never satisfied with its own work, I must admit we did a quite incredible job so far. In two years we built not one but two programming languages: Red/System which is in beta state and usable to make real world apps, and Red which is in alpha state and evolving at very fast pace. We built two compilers and one interpreter. We replaced the whole gcc toolchain by our own simple one with incredibly small footprint. We run on ARM platforms since a year now and some experimental Red/System code even runs on Arduino boards. If someone told me two years ago that we will accomplish all that, I am not sure I would have believe it.

So in order to celebrate what we have achieved so far, I offer you an animation showing the history of all 1554 public commits of the project (excluding merge commits) in less than 2 minutes:

This video was made using the gource tool and encoded using ffmpeg. This is my first video uploaded to youtube, so I had to lower the original video quality in order for youtube to process it correctly. You can view it in 720p for best quality.

You can see me and Peter WA Wood flying around the project files making changes and addition. Sometimes Andreas Bolka is popping up to give us a hand, usually on pretty complex bug cases or to update his ELF format emitter.

I would like to take this opportunity to thank all the people that sent me donations since the beginning, that strongly believe in and support Red project. I would like to especially thank the biggest donators:

Nick Antonaccio

Jerry Tsai

Gregg Irwin

Bas de Lange

Petr Krenzelok

I would have never believed that such level of support from a small community of followers was possible. I am amazed and feel extremely grateful to these people and all the other ones that sent me donations or contributed in a way or another to Red. I would also like to mention and thank two direct contributors to Red project: Kaj de Vos, for his involvement in supporting Red and all the bindings he produced for Red/System, Kaj is still the most prolific Red/System coder so far, and Rudolf Meijer for reverse-engineering Red/System and writing the official language specification document.

To all Red followers, I wish you a Happy New Year! Among many other new features, this year will see the extension of Red to mobile world, with full support for Android and iOS. Let's make it the year where Red will rise even higher than we could have thought possible!

I think all such projects need initially a lot of work from very few people for a time period that looks to people that do the work (or anxious observers) like forever and to outsiders like a blink of an eye. Then exponential growth kicks in and everything goes crazy :)

Anxious observers (like me) I think will have to wait a few years to actually see the takeoff.